Editor's Note: "Bird Houses" by Camilla Richardson was published in "Sacred Hearth," the first issue of Voice & Virtue Literary Magazine. The full piece can be read here.
Some art comes effortlessly, some through much trial and error. Sometimes, it starts as a nugget of gold that takes weeks, months, or even years to refine to its pure essence. No matter the process, all blood, sweat and tears feel worth it in the end to have that product of truth or beauty which our efforts birthed.
I believe all art is born of difficulty, even those “effortless” pieces where creativity flows like a faucet at our fingertips. The hardship simply came earlier, through our griefs, our many hours studying, our rejections and disappointments. It tilled the soil of our souls, creating fertile ground where the seeds of inspiration could sprout, age, and bear fruit, ready to be plucked onto the page.
The inspiration for my piece “Bird Houses” came from a parking lot tree.
While running errands, my eyes landed on a lone mesquite tree planted near my vehicle in a bland desert parking lot. This tree, the only green thing in sight, appeared to have a gaping wound. Someone had trimmed a large branch and the profuse offering of spilled sap dried along the trunk and base, a display of what the cut had cost the tree.
The sap—dark maroon—-caused an almost gory scene, and a a visceral reaction in me. I wonder how much that hurt, was my automatic thought. But, wait— trees don’t feel pain. Right?
My memory screamed: Didn’t you read a study showing that trees communicate through their roots, alerting other trees to threats? How could they recognize a threat except through the pain of experience?
Driving home, I pondered the woodpeckers who visit my quail block. How much sap do they inadvertently pour from our palo verde trees? And the squirrels and owls that burrow into trunks here in my desert backyard. Do the trees feel every peck, every peeled piece of bark as it’s stripped away?
Perhaps these thoughts were a bit dark. To me, it made sense that becoming home to these creatures would be an excruciating sacrifice. But it was also what the trees were meant for, which connected these ideas to motherhood for me.

As I share in the poem, I’m not a mother. But just as I noticed the tree and stopped to gaze at its marked oblation, I also notice the weariness, the tears, the tightened mouths of mothers everywhere under the strain of their role. With twelve nieces and nephews, I have seen the sacrifice of motherhood up close. For five years, I ran a group home for teen mothers. My circle of best friends are all moms. I’ve held my fair share of crying newborns, wiped spittle from shirts, and helped a new mom breastfeed that first overnight in the hospital. Surrounded by the beauty and sacrifice that is motherhood, I couldn’t escape it if I tried. But I wouldn’t want to, because mothers know how to love with their entire selves, their literal bodies a kind of holy sacrifice to their calling. It’s daunting and incredible.
Watching how much they give, how much effort they put into loving their littles, it’s been a painful truth to witness that at the end of the day, they don’t sit in their successes, but berate themselves for their failings. I’ve had many a phone call where a whispered, “I feel like a bad mom,” was confessed in broken defeat.
The irony is many mothers are doing their hefty job beautifully. They are watching and cheering and playing. Yet they feel like failures. I wish they would take the pressure off. I wish they’d stop comparing. “Bird Houses” came out of that wish, out of that broken tree and all it reminded me of.
As I began writing about that tree’s pain, I felt that ache in me well up for mothers to know they are seen, they are doing enough, they are sacrificing so much, and it’s noticed. Perhaps not by everyone, but by someone. For the mothers in my life, it’s noticed by me. I am thankful to be planted alongside them, connected at our foundation and sharing what hurts, what threatens, what’s good, what saturates.
I am not a mother, but to the tips of my roots, I feel it all with them.
About the Author
Hailing from Arizona, Camilla was born with a pencil in one hand--eraser, non-negotiable--and a library card in the other. You can currently find her with a cup of Ceylon tea, combing through archives and working away on a historical fiction novel involving the women of Southeast Asia.
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